It’s practically a mantra among the executives at CBC. What are the strengths of the public broadcaster? From president Robert Rabinovitch through his vice-presidents Alex Frame and Harold Redekopp to program director Slawko Klymkiw, they all talk about children’s programming, news and current affairs, sports, and arts and entertainment as the focal points for the organization.

With the exception of children’s shows, these genres run counter to commercial programming in the United States and, with a few exceptions, in Canada. The World Series, Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl apart, what sporting activities are ever broadcast in primetime slots in the U.S.? 60 Minutes and W-FIVE exempted, what other North American broadcaster puts current affairs shows on as one of its main activities? And would any other network tackle a high art program like Opening Night at any time, let alone on Thursday nights?

Given the uniqueness of the CBC’s ‘core competencies,’ as Rabinovitch terms them, Playback takes a look at what they are doing now and where they have been.

Sports nights in Canada

Tony Agostini is excited. It’s playoff time in hockey and, as the senior director for CBC Sports, he’s got four mobile crews operating in Canada and the U.S. The Hockey Night in Canada team, headed up by executive producer Joel Darling, is taking feeds from all of the games and viewing them at the Broadcast Centre in Toronto. There, a staff of 25 is assembling the material at top speed, ready to broadcast footage of goals being scored in games being played thousands of miles away.

‘Hockey Night in Canada is a tradition on Saturday nights,’ points out Agostini, ‘and when the playoffs come, particularly when Canadian teams are in, there’s a great deal of passion. And that same passion is part of the broadcast at all levels. All you have to do is come into a mobile and take a look at the skill set of the technical crew, the camera people – they’re all outstanding. At Hockey Night in Canada, from the voice of Bob Cole on down, there’s a very high professional standard.’

That standard extends to the CBC’s coverage of other high-profile events, most notably the Olympics. At Salt Lake this winter, CBC Sports broadcast nearly 250 hours of live and taped events on the main network. ‘So you’re on for about 16 hours a day and you have to be able to go from hockey to curling to biathlon – and then there’s a breaking story. I don’t need to tell you about the Sale/Pelletier voting scandal and about how much time off the top that took, how much information Canadians wanted about that particular [figure skating] story. So not only do you need to be able to cover what’s happened in the rink, but when there’s that kind of controversy, you have to deal with other issues. Even Pelletier began to worry about our coverage of other athletes!’

For Agostini, the Olympics isn’t just about big events. The CBC broadcasts amateur sports regularly. Many Olympians have known CBC reporters for years and encountered them in lower-profile events. ‘When you speak with them,’ Agostini points out, ‘they may be more willing to talk about themselves. The notion is not to look for the person who is gonna look best on television. It’s really for us to be able to reflect what their achievements are and to try to help people to figure out what they’ve done to get there.’

Through events like The Northern Games and Hockey Day in Canada, CBC Sports remains connected to a communal ideal of sports. Instead of just showing Canadian NHL teams during its Hockey Day specials, the sports unit has shown highlights of amateurs beating the world record for the longest game. ‘It was really funny,’ recalls Agostini. ‘I think the score was 175 to 133. But it was a celebration of hockey.’

And the documentary on the traditional sports of the North, shot in Yellowknife, won a prestigious award in Italy. Other documentaries that CBC Sports has shown include an NFB-produced piece on amateur shinny and a coproduction on the Carnegie brothers who encountered racism as hockey athletes in Canada in the ’50s.

‘There is a huge tradition here at CBC Sports,’ concludes Agostini. ‘We see ourselves passing the torch to another generation in the future. There’s pride and passion here and respect for Canadian audiences.’

The children’s hours

Although the CBC has a rich history in children’s shows, going back to the rotund puppet Uncle Chichimus through The Friendly Giant, Sesame Street and Kids of Degrassi Street, the broadcaster is in the process of revitalizing its programming. Cheryl Hassen, creative head of arts and entertainment for children’s programs, is presiding over an exciting period where interactivity, hosting and fresh programs are being ushered into the network.

With 43 hours of programming per week, Hassen has a clear mandate to build on the CBC’s strengths and increase a loyal viewership among children. Two blocks in the CBC’s schedule have been designated for children. There’s a solid preschool section every morning called ‘Get Set for Life,’ hosted by the personable duo of Alyson and Michael. Then, in the late afternoon, there’s a funkier, more chilled-out block for older kids who have come back from school. There, interactivity is being encouraged through such innovations as Spy Net, where kids can help to solve a case and move the show’s story forward.

The preschool shows are a mixture of such animated hits as Rolie Polie Olie, Arthur and Little Bear with the more informational Zoboomafoo, about animals, and Sesame Park. Through scheduling and hosting, Hassen expects to truly animate this block. ‘Get Set for Life in the morning is about working together with parents to provide quality experiences for their children. Part of that experience involves television, and what we try to do is look at things that aid in the social, emotional and cognitive development of children. And, more specifically than that, we are zeroing in on developing the optimistic child. We’re looking to contribute toward the creation of children with strong self-esteem and self-worth and awareness.’

The after-school block, weekdays from 4-6 p.m., is where the CBC intends to build on its successful website. The programming here is funnier and more cynical, with the anchor show being The Simpsons. Hassen admits that this time frame ‘is in its nascent stages, moving towards becoming a highly competitive block. Previously we might have been softer with shows that bordered on appealing to preschoolers or children attending early elementary classes. Now we have an audience of after-school kids, eight- to 12-year-olds, that we would like to satisfy in a more significant way.’

Their new focus here centres on InfomatriX, segments hosted by Anthony McLean, which feature kids’ reviews and encourage children to log on to a website and ‘shout out’ a message to their family and friends. By next season, Hassen is planning to allow for more interactivity through new shows like Dream Kids, which will dramatize the fantasies of children and then offer the opportunity, through the Web, of allowing young viewers to respond to the dreams they have just seen.

It’s quite a shift from The Friendly Giant, but then children have changed too. ‘You don’t need to be cheap and sensational,’ comments Hassen. ‘I’m sure that we’ve hit the right tone and feel with our hosted shows.’

News is always a current affair

‘We didn’t know until the morning transpired, that this was to be the biggest story that most of us would deal with in our careers.’ Tony Burman, the editor in chief of CBC News and Current Affairs, is talking about 9/11. ‘Instinctively, without really articulating anything, there was a feeling that this was an occasion which the CBC as a public broadcaster, and CBC News in particular, was put here to do.’

Moving quickly but coolly, CBC’s news teams were deployed to New York and, significantly, Pakistan. While that was taking place, Canada’s public broadcaster was developing its own narrative about the events of that tragic day.

‘I think that the CBC recognized sooner than the American television networks that this was a story that had a wider international context,’ comments Burman. ‘We took the wide shot much faster than our American television colleagues, and I think that Canadians appreciated that. We were the only North American network that really felt that the story was happening outside of North America, as well as in Manhattan and the Pentagon. The Americans were focused on the human drama that was in front of them, literally, in New York City at the World Trade Center. Like the European networks, we sensed that this was a very complicated, political drama that required a lot of careful explanation and context.’

As a national broadcaster in a multicultural society, Burman feels that CBC News properly reflected the concerns of its home constituency by looking at all angles of that terrible time. The events of 9/11 were viewed by millions. It reinforced the significance of CBC’s news department both here and in the U.S., where many Americans were able to tune into broadcasts that were simulcast on cable channels.

Documentaries and journalistic shows dominate the CBC, particularly on Tuesday and Wednesday nights when such shows as Life & Times, Witness, Disclosure, The Nature of Things and the fifth estate are broadcast. Although only Mark Starowicz has an in-house documentary unit, strong non-fiction pieces are a staple of the network. And Starowicz’s Canada: A People’s History is surely the signature series that brought the public broadcaster back to its core values.

For Burman, the centrepiece of all this programming will always be the hard news show, The National. A veteran who got his break on CBC Radio, as did many of his colleagues including Starowicz and Peter Mansbridge, he believes strongly in the ‘branding’ of CBC television as a news broadcaster.

‘We have benefited in an odd way from the events of Sept. 11 and the current crisis in the Middle East. If you look back to the ’80s and early ’90s, the end of Communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union were seminal developments in our lives that we experienced through the CBC’s various programs. The past 10 to 20 years have reinforced the CBC’s strengths as journalists who know how to show historic events in an insightful way.’

The play’s the thing: arts

programming at the CBC

There was a time when the presentation of high culture was a major activity at the CBC. Norman Campbell made a 47-year career out of directing Stratford plays and National Ballet productions. Though the audiences for many of his pieces may not have been huge, Campbell’s work with luminaries like Nureyev, Kain and Plummer was acknowledged as something the public broadcaster ought to do.

By the late ’80s, arts programming at the CBC had fallen on tough times. With the exception of Adrienne Clarkson Presents, a prestigious documentary show that occasionally showed performance films made by Toronto’s acclaimed Rhombus Media, precious little was broadcast of a cultural nature.

That’s why George Anthony, the creative head of arts, music, science and variety at the CBC, and his colleague Robert Sherin are so excited about Opening Night. Once again, opera, dance and theatre are being broadcast nationally on the CBC.

Two of the premiere year’s signal successes came from out West: an adaptation of The Overcoat from Vancouver and Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin’s wonderfully delirious evocation of Dracula. Thanks to the support of Redekopp and Rabinovitch, Sherin and Anthony are already firming next year’s schedule, which will include a contemporary dance piece from the Quebec company La La La Human Steps, an opera called Le Mozart Noir, about a neglected black composer who was a contemporary of Mozart’s, a music and dance piece that is a tribute to West Coast artist Bill Reid, a Rhombus performance film entitled The Songs of Harold Arlen and docs on Glenn Gould and animator Frederic Bach.

Comedy, the only performing arts strength at the CBC for years, will be back in force with new episodes of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Red Green Show and Royal Candian Air Farce. New sitcoms will be tried out by the CBC, but, with the exception of King of Kensington, The Newsroom and Made In Canada, few have been successful in the past. For the 50th anniversary’s celebratory month of September, Anthony has commissioned Satire Gold, an Alan Novak-produced piece that will look at the many contributions comedians have made to the CBC over the decades. Wayne and Shuster, Kids in the Hall, Air Farce and the 22 Minutes gang are all due to appear on this show.

Even without a variety show, this fall’s programming bodes well for the presentation of the arts in Canada. For the small but dedicated audience devoted to such cultural matters, that’s good news, indeed.